When we brought Barney home from the shelter, he was so sick he was almost dead. We didn't know this, and so we thought his energy level was always going to be on the low side. In addition, they told us that he was basically full grown at a little over 5 pounds. So you can imagine our confusion that his recent level of energy and resulting mischief have been INCREDIBLE, and also that he has been growing--as of yesterday, he weighs 9 pounds. To find out how much bigger and more active he could get. I decided to research his breeds (Toy Fox Terrier and Papillon, which they had guessed at the shelter) with a little more depth.

Imagine my surprise to see that he is already WAY taller than he's supposed to be, and he's also substantially heavier (and he's skinny). This brought me to the revelation that the shelter was probably wrong about his breed. So I did some research. Hmm: long legs, very active, likes to hunt and torment cats, good watch dog, very smart, needs mental and physical exercise, tries to be the boss, etc.

I'd known all along that he looked like some types of Jack Russell Terrier, only he has always had long legs (and some of you commented on this as well), but what I didn't know is that THERE IS A LONG-LEGGED VARIETY OF THE JACK RUSSELL TERRIER, known as the Parson Russell Terrier. Crap. Double crap--JRTs are known for being FULL of energy (explains his need for a minimum of 2 walks per day), prideful (think they're the biggest dogs on the block), bossy, and rash. Some people call them Jack Russell Terrorists. On they plus side, they're incredibly smart, brave, loyal, and skilled (originally bred for farm/hunting work), and they can be tamed with VERY consistent training.

So, the good news for Barney is that, even though we would NEVER have brought him home if we had known that his ancestry included at least part JRT (I suspect that if he isn't a purebred, he may be a "Jack Rat"--half JRT half Rat Terrier), but we like him enough to train him to stop being a jerk.

Everyone in the department is really big on Halloween, and there's even a costume contest going on today. I figured I'd better participate, so I taped a piece of paper to my shirt with a bunch of obscure questions on it (e.g., Kenya is the world's largest exporter of what?; In 1773, the British Parliament passed what act that enraged American colonialists?; etc.). The answer to all the questions was "tea," making me a "tea test."

What's interesting here is that a t-test is a statistical procedure used in the social sciences to determine if the difference between two groups (e.g., people in a room that smells like oranges vs. people in a room that smells like nothing) on some dependent variable (e.g., amount of money kept) is likely to have occurred by chance alone. In other words, a t-test tells you if your experiment worked.

In other words, I am a nerd for Halloween.

I played basketball at the rec center today with some guys who mostly spoke Spanish. Basketball is basketball, but I did notice something peculiar: the guys kept saying things to each other like, "tiene tu novio" and "ven a tu novio." I understood the phrases to mean, "have your boyfriend," and "see your boyfriend." I got the idea (i.e., guard your man, see your man), but I guess I never really understood how much of a Romance language Spanish actually is--even in basketball, there is abundant, unavoidable, systemic man love.

Also, here's my take on the orange scent experiment: the scent of oranges, or any food for that matter, signals something very important to our brains--namely, it signals that important resources are nearby and are probably accessible and abundant, and if our brains believe there is a safe supply of resources, then there's a lot less pressure to have to hoard other resources, such as money that belongs to someone else.

Picture this: You're in a room participating in a psychology experiment. An experimenter comes in and gives you $12 in cash. The experimenter says that this cash was taken from someone in another room, someone you'll never meet, and your job is to decide how to fairly divide the money between that person and yourself. You could give it all back. You could divide it evenly. You could keep all $12 and send $0 back. What do you do?

As it turns out, what you do depends in part on what the rooms smells like. See, in this experiment half of the participants were in a room that smelled like oranges. The other half were in a room that didn't really smell like anything, but either way, people in both conditions didn't notice any particular smells. What's super interesting is the result: the group in the orange flavored room gave an average of $5.33 back, while the group in the regular room gave $2.81.

So the question, then, is why does a non-detectable smell of oranges lead to more fairness?

The secret of the triangles is that there is no secret of the triangles. They're just triangles moving around a screen. The interesting thing is that you're still thinking about them. What could they mean? What's this about? What just happened? What's happening now?

The experiment I'm going to be running a little later has to do with how the events going on in our social world influence what we see in neutral stimuli--like triangles moving around on a screen. It's like a Rorschach test, only different.

I said there would be triangles. Here are triangles.

I saw two brilliant shooting stars this morning as I walked Barney the amazing pooping dog (it shoots right out his rear!!) in the pre-dawn darkness. When I spotted the first one, I thought I was just seeing things (like planes at the nearby airport), but when I saw the second, I figured that there was either a meteor shower, or I was going to have a really weird day. As it turns out, the annual Orionid Meteor Shower peaks tomorrow a little before down.

It's probably time for an update, but there's nothing all that new to report. Barney has been eating both (a) poison mushrooms and the yard (which made him throw up) and (b) poison excrement from the cat box (which made him throw up from his back end, if you know what I mean...wait for it...wait for it). So that's been exciting. And smelly.

On Friday (and into Saturday), I spent seven or eight hours putting together our new dining room table and six chairs--in the midst of cleaning up after said dog--also exciting. And yesterday, I made what I think was a sponge cake from scratch. It was a surprisingly good cake; based the recipe on something I saw on TV.

For a smallish cake:
Beat three eggs for about 4 minutes on medium speed.
Add 2 tsp vanilla, beat for about 30 seconds.
Add 3/4 cups sugar, 1/4 cup at a time, beating about 30 seconds for each addition.
Using a spoon, stir in 1 cup flour, sifted, 1/4 cup at a time until all is dissolved.
Do not over-stir (you'll lose volume).
Bake at 375 until a knife comes out clean (15-17 minutes for a cake pan; 25 minutes for a bread pan).

I topped it with a peach and apple reduction (with brown sugar and cinnamon), but I think it would have been better with raspberries or Nutella.

The other night I woke up in a panic thinking there was a tarantula on my face. Still 99% asleep, I slapped myself on the cheek and whipped my head around to try and fling it off. As I drifted back to sleep, I hoped that Sarah hadn't woken up by my silly, sleep/dream-induced behavior--not because I was worried I'd disturbed her sleep, but because I knew she'd laugh at me.

When I woke up a few hours later, I was still a little creeped out by the dream, but then I spotted the GIANT cockroach on the wall by the bed, and I felt a lot better about myself. The only question that remains is WHY THE HECK WAS HE ON MY FACE!?!?

At least it wasn't a tarantula.

In response to one of the comments from the previous post: interestingly, I have done some research on the differences in the forms of aggression used by men and women. For a long time, people thought that women weren't really as aggressive as men, and then someone remembered that punching people isn't the only form of aggression out there.

As it turns out, women prefer to use what's called "relationship" or "indirect" aggression (big shock right?). So while a woman isn't nearly as likely as a man to actually stab you in the back, she is probably a little more likely to metaphorically do so--by gossiping about you or sabotaging your social life, career, etc.

Or she might just lynch a doll beside your desk.

I've mentioned to a few people about how everyone down here in the Metroplex seems to be a little too concerned with power, authority, and the maintenance of established hierarchies. I'm sure you'll recall Sarah's interactions with the secretary formerly at her building.

Maybe it's a holdover from the traditions established during slavery, but from what I can tell, everyone down here has to submit to somebody else, and as a result, when somebody gets an opportunity to wield power over someone else, that opportunity is absolutely relished.

Among my new fellow students at my new school, I don't really fit very well into the established hierarchy, in which the "first years" don't know anything about anything and aren't really treated with all that much respect as a result. I'm not all that special, but I have already been a grad student for a while, and it turns out that I'm good at it. Although it surprised me a little at first that some of students with more seniority turned a little cold when they found this out, I think I get the picture.

A few weeks ago, my office mate, who is a fifth-year student who doesn't spend any time on campus, told me that I could take her desk and do "whatever" with the office. I told her I would do just that, and a few days later, I rearranged it to my liking.

Which brings me to the above picture of a baby hanging from the wall of my office. It was accompanied by a nasty note from said office mate that said something to the effect of, "How dare you touch my things."

Apparently, the baby is passed back and forth among the grad students as a joke, but I'm not sure if it's typically done as some sort of a warning. Oops.

Christ instructed his followers to forgive offenses committed against them. For most of us, this isn't exactly an easy task. As it turns out, that guy from Nazareth might actually have been on to something.

Carlsmith, Wilson, & Gilbert (2008) did an experiment in which the participants played a game where the goal was to work together with the other participants (who were actually in on the experiment--confederates) to make money. One of these confederates always screwed up the game with negligence and ruined it for the real participant. Later, some of the participants were told they were going to be allowed to punish the confederate by taking money away from him. Other participants were told simply that the game was over.

All participants predicted that they would feel better if they were allowed to punish, but in reality, those who punished (a) continued to think about what happened and couldn't move on, (b) were in significantly worse moods than those who didn't punish, and even (c) thought they would have felt even worse if they hadn't been able to punish--THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF WHAT ACTUALLY WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.

In other words, even if forgiveness is hard, even if it seems like it isn't fair, even if it sometimes doesn't make sense, it's the better way. True 2000 years ago. True today. True always.

There's a notion out there that "tempting fate" is a bad idea. If your favorite basketball player is at the free throw line with the game on the line, and the announcer says that the player is a 90% shooter, chances are, he'll miss and your team will lose. If you hear there's a 50% chance of rain, and you go out without your umbrella, it will probably rain. If you don't read my blog regularly, you'll get a horrible disease and there will be weeping a gnashing of teeth. And the like.

Even though our rationality says otherwise, even though we know a 50% chance of rain is a 50% chance of rain--regardless of what we do with our umbrella--we're still nervous to "tempt fate." As it turns out, we believe these things because it's less taxing for our brains than actually figuring out rational likelihoods and probabilities (Risen & Gilovich, 2008).

So good news, if you're superstitious, or even "a little stitious," you actually have more of your brain power available to do other, more important, things; like figuring out why people keep trying to mess with David Letterman.

Recent research out of the University of Toronto suggests that, although women are initially less tolerant of pain than are men, they adapt to the pain better than men do, and it bothers them less in the long run.

Finally, an explanation for why women wear high heels and uncomfortable clothes and men don't.